


only bodies

by qwerty24



Category: Unforgotten (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, F/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 13:05:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17849978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwerty24/pseuds/qwerty24
Summary: Post-Series 3. Cassie returns to work, but investigating so many brutal crimes has taken its toll on her. When another murder inquiry comes their way, will Cassie be able to turn to Sunny, or will it unravel her for good?





	only bodies

I want to cut your sorrows out. I want to sew your bones back, re-blood your history, undo you like a mystery. I want to tell you yes.

– adapted from [Kallie Falandays](https://pankmagazine.com/piece/two-poems-75/)

* * *

 

When Andrews calls Cassie to ask if she’d like to return, he uses the word “provisionally” like she’s some fragile thing to be handled with care. She surprises herself with a “yes” that comes easier than expected. She misses it. The work, the sense of purpose, the pursuit of justice. And even if she won’t admit it, she misses throwing herself into other people’s lives so she can forget her own.

When Cassie steps back into the CID, she feels like she never left. The low hum of the fans, the whiteboards covered in photos and smudged marker, stacks of manila folders – Collier’s desk is especially bad, the faint odor of day-old coffee. She settles into her office to read the brief the acting DCI has written up for her on their latest case and waits for everyone to arrive.

That first day back is clockwork, the rhythm of her team, the easy back-and-forth. She shouldn’t have worried. Fran swings by her office to drop off a statement, and before she turns to leave, she pauses for a moment, “It’s good to have you back, boss,” and Cassie can tell the young woman is tempering a smile as the door closes behind her.

And of course, there is Sunny. Her DI, her partner, her confidant. She hasn’t seen him since they visited Hayley Reid’s final resting place four months ago. It should be a good memory – yellow tulips, the gentle give of the earth beneath her feet, the warmth of the sunlight, but a long shadow looms over it instead. Dead, raped girls, dirt filling their open mouths, bones bleached white in the sterile light of the pathology lab. She wonders if Sunny can read it on her, the way she knows he could before her breakdown, wonders if he is haunted the way she is.

At the pub that evening, after everyone has had a few rounds, Cassie gets a call. They’ve found a body. Bones lodged behind the drywall of a warehouse undergoing demolition. Sunny feels Cassie tense at his side and a dark look crosses her face. “Good timing, eh?” he tries, but her expression is impassive. Maybe it’s too soon.

They think it might be one of Tim Finch’s girls at first, when they figure out the body is female. But she is so small. Too small and too young to be one of his. On the morning of the second day, Dr. Balcombe calls them into the lab. She handles the skull – the little girl skull – gingerly and gently. “Here,” she points with a gloved finger, “these are her milk teeth.” Cassie thinks she might be sick.

* * *

Her name is Rebecca Summers. A ward of the state who went missing from her foster family in 1982 at the age of eight. The file Murray digs out from the archives is thin. Nobody has been looking very hard for her. She’d run away from a care home once before, so the police assumed she’d simply done it again.

Sunny finds a grainy photo of her in some records from social services. Her hair is in plaits and the collar of her shirt is starched and sharp. She smiles beatifically out at them from her place on the dry erase board next to a photo of her own skeleton.

This is how it starts, the beginning of the end of Cassie’s relationship with John. First, Rebecca’s body, and then the insomnia, the nightmares, the dark moods. He finds her awake in the early hours of the dawn, poring over a file she cannot talk to him about. “It’s another dead girl,” is all she can say, and he understands, or at least tries to, waiting up for her when she comes back from late nights at the station, stroking her hair when she startles awake, making her breakfast before she leaves.

He’s a good man, Cassie thinks, even as she draws away from him, recoils from his touch when he tries to soothe her, diverting her eyes when he tries to talk to her. How can he understand? Maybe he could before, when he was still in the force, but not anymore, and certainly not this case, this little girl they have found in the wall.

When it finally falls apart, she is almost relieved. It’s midnight, maybe already the next day, but the lights in the kitchen are still on. “I’ll get a plate for you,” John says, but he doesn’t move from his seat at the end of the table. She can tell he wants to talk again. She needs a drink.

“Cass,” he starts, and she whips around to face him. “Maybe you shouldn’t get so…” he falters, “…invested.” She bristles at his words, but his eyes are kind and his voice is soft and pleading. Jesus.

She takes a long gulp of wine, trying to keep her anger from spilling over. “Invested? If it was your daughter stuffed into the insulation of a building like trash, wouldn’t you want someone who was at least a little invested to find out who did it to her?” She knows it’s a low blow as soon as she says it, but his gaze hardens, and something irrevocable shifts between them.

He shakes his head, defeated. “I don’t understand, Cassie. After Hayley, after everything. You can’t go on like this.”

She watches the taillights of John’s car fade into the inky night as he drives back down to Hampshire. He’d kissed her forehead sweetly one last time before he left. “Take care of yourself,” he’d whispered into her hair, but she can already feel that familiar impulse, something close to self-destruction, rising to the surface.

* * *

Sunny and Cassie drive up to Sheffield late on a Friday evening to meet with one of Rebecca’s foster brothers. The traffic on the M1 is terrible. By the time they arrive, the city is shuttering for the night. They manage to nab the last of some dodgy takeaway before making their way to the hotel.

They spent the long drive over talking about the case – the social worker who placed Rebecca, the foster sister who had faint recollections of the feisty young girl who slept in the lower bunk for two months before she disappeared, the biological sister who only knew her as a hungry baby in a home filled with neglect. Now, Cassie wants to talk about something else. “How are the girls?” she asks as she digs into some cold rice.

Sunny smiles, buoyed for a moment as he thinks of his daughters. “The usual growing pains,” he responds. “There’s this boy Aisha insists on sneaking around with…” he shakes his head. Cassie laughs at the pained expression on Sunny’s face. She wants to tell him he’s a good father, but she holds her tongue.

“And the girlfriend?” she pries.

“Sal and I,” he lets out a short puff of air, “we broke it off. Well, she did.”

“Ah,” Cassie hedges, awkward now. “I’m sorry.”

“Occupational hazard,” Sunny jokes, but neither of them crack a smile.

* * *

All those late nights they spent together, just the two of them alone at the station or a little pissed after work, and yet the first time it happens, they’re both stone cold sober in a grimy pub inn. She needs to shower, Cassie thinks dimly as Sunny’s mouth finds her jaw, tracing an insistent path down the column of her neck. She’s been in the car for half the day and she’s absolutely knackered.

But she’s back against the headboard now, bed covers tangled around her feet, Sunny’s hands at her waist, creeping up under her shirt. She wonders if he can feel her skin burn where his fingers touch her. This is a terrible idea, she repeats to herself, even as she opens her mouth to him for another desperate, bruising kiss, even as she opens her legs to him so he can settle against her, an exquisite spark of friction lighting between their clothed bodies.

It’s a terrible idea until it isn’t. Until he pulls back, pupils dark and blown wide, breath shallow, “Cassie, only if you want this. Only if –.” She presses her fingers against his lips, feels the slickness of her own saliva there, and kisses him hard, teeth nipping and tongue roaming, silencing his doubts.

He is deft with her buttons, drawing whorls on every patch of skin he exposes, reveling in the way she shivers. She responds less elegantly, tugging at his shirt, grappling with his belt before he stills her unwieldy hands with his own. “Slow down,” he whispers into the hollow of her throat.

Unbidden, she thinks about the things that happen to women who have sex with men in seedy hotels, remembers all the cases she’s worked on, dangerous men, in-danger women. At best, some unspeakable violence, at worst, death, or something close to it. So many headlines: dead hookers, dead girlfriends, dead mistresses. Except she’s never been afraid of Sunny, never felt anything but safe with him.

And now: in bed together, half-naked already, not even a little drunk, his hand traveling up her thigh, her hips canting up to meet him. There were other times – once on the Walker case, that terrible investigation with so many damaged lives – when they had come close to starting something, but she was always on guard, this one good thing in her life she couldn’t risk fucking up.

Who knew it would take falling apart and putting herself back together again for the two of them to finally find each other. Cassie can’t quite believe it, that after everything, this is the way it happens, another awful case, those small bones still seared into her mind’s eye, so many terrible secrets they are sure to unearth. It must be the sense memory of a murder inquiry, the years they have accumulated together on the job coming to a head.

They have never done this, yet Sunny is more than adept at making her writhe beneath him, mouth working a spot on her collarbone, fingers brushing between her thighs. “Fuck, Sunny,” she moans, intending to say more, but losing the rest of the thought as he pushes her underwear aside to touch her. Christ. She tries to reciprocate, palming him through his pants, but then he’s knuckle deep inside her, and the only thing she’s doing is gripping the sheets and arching her back off the bed.

A strangled, needy sound escapes Cassie as she presses a fist to her mouth to silence it. He thinks she looks beautiful: hair splayed out on the pillows, eyes bright with want, muscles taut and firm. He wants to watch her come apart. But then she grips his wrist, stilling his hand. She’s nimble and strong as she pushes him onto his back and straddles him, and takes off her bra and knickers.

Sunny forgets how to breathe for a moment as he takes in the sight of her above him, pale skin flushed with exertion, the faintest smattering of freckles he wants to trace with his tongue. She can feel his gaze on her and bites down on her lower lip to suppress a smile. “Too many clothes, don’t you think?” she quips as she undresses him.

“No lingerie today, sorry,” he fires back, and her snort giggle in response lights up something warm in him. But then she shifts above him, and any thoughts of humorous levity are gone. There’s really no going back from this. She moves again, pensive, and lets out a small gasp as she feels him straining beneath her.

He reaches up to brush a stray strand of hair out of her face, suddenly overcome with tenderness as she braces her hands on his chest to lower herself onto him. He cups her jaw, angles her so he can look into her eyes when she takes him all the way, a little unfocused, panting, nails digging into him. Fuck. It’s better than she imagined, and she’s not above admitting she has imagined this after finishing a bottle of wine, and a few times even when she hasn’t.

His hands go to her hips, fingers gripping her ass hard enough to bruise, steadying her as they find a rhythm. The dull ache of him stretching her, the delicious friction on every down thrust, the way he rises to meet her, all of it is so fucking good. She lets her mind go blank, forgets about work, the case, all the cases before this one. There’s just Sunny, the two of them and where they’re joined, the tension coiling low in her stomach, spreading up her spine.

She’s so close, has been since his fingers inside her earlier, and she doesn’t think she can or wants to hold out much longer. “Sunny,” she gasps, but it might just be a cry, pitchy and desperate. Her orgasm tears through her, white hot, pinpricks of light sparking behind her eyelids, and she can’t quite keep herself upright, shuddering as her forearms give out. He catches her and holds her to him as he thrusts once, twice more before joining her there, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her shoulder to stifle an animal groan.

Cassie needs a moment to catch her breath and collect herself. She feels Sunny’s heart hammering beneath her ear and his lips graze over her damp hairline. She rolls off him clumsily, all limbs and sweaty skin. Sunny turns to her, looks like he’s about to speak, but she clambers out of bed before he has a chance.

She locks the door to the bathroom behind her. Jesus. What have they done? They’ve been so easy and so good together as co-workers. If only they weren’t good with each other in this way too. If only the throbbing between her legs didn’t make her want him again. She turns the hot water in the shower on all the way, near-scalding, and douses the whole bottle of travel-sized shampoo on her head.

Maybe this doesn’t have to change things between them. Maybe sex can be sex and work can be work. She steels herself as she returns to the bedroom, ready to face whatever expectations Sunny might have of her. But as she reaches the bed, the sight that greets her is Sunny tangled in the sheets, snoring gently, peacefully asleep.

Cassie makes her way back to her adjoining room as surreptitiously as possible. It’s nearly one in the morning, but her mind whirs, Sunny, the sex they’ve just had, the case, everything melding into an impossible question. When she falls asleep, dawn light is filtering through the window slats, but she can still taste his mouth, feel his hands on her, see his eyes go liquid as he looks at her.

* * *

Sunny tries to talk to her the next morning, but Cassie brings a file to breakfast, the contents of which she spreads out over the table, hands busy, yakking a mile a minute. Later, alone in the car, he tries again, but she calls Fran for an update on the forensics. He notices she has buttoned her blouse all the way up to the collar. He can’t be sure why, but he thinks he has the matching wounds to show for the night before. A tender spot where his neck meets his shoulder, nail crescents on his chest and back, a shadow of burst capillaries he has hidden under his lanyard.

The trip up to Sheffield is ultimately fruitless for their case even if it has been more than eventful for the two of them. Rebecca’s foster brother stone walls them, reticent to talk about his time in care. He tells them he can barely remember much of his childhood shuttled from family to family.

Cassie offers to drive the first stretch back to London. In the car, she turns the radio on, some girl-group bubblegum pop Sunny recognizes from Gemma’s musical tastes blaring through the speakers. She can’t possibly think they can put this off forever.

Two hours later, in the parking lot of a service area, she turns to him. He clocks the faintest look of apprehension before she sets her face with a grim expression. “Sunny, it can’t happen again, what we did.”

Part of him wants to lob something snarky back, ask her what precisely it was she thinks they did. Have sex? Fuck? Give in to this thing that’s been growing between them? But instead he says, “Cassie, whatever you want.” And it kills him a little because it’s true, and because he can’t quite find it in him to regret what they’ve done. God, he won’t say it now, but he cares for her, maybe more than she knows, wishes she would let him in.

She recognizes the look in Sunny’s eyes, that terrible kindness which makes her feel paper thin, like he could just reach out and break her open. Of course he wouldn’t put up a fight. Of course he would never ask of her something she couldn’t give. So why does some part of her wish he would disagree? Wish he would tell her they could at least try? Wish he would touch her like he did the other night, push her back against the seat, kiss her hard and shove his tongue down her throat?

Shit. She closes her eyes, presses her fingers to her temples. “Thanks,” she murmurs, inadequate, but the best she can manage right now.

Sunny drives the rest of the way back to London. In the passenger seat, Cassie pores over the new forensic evidence. Rebecca’s remains were well preserved. “Cold and dry,” Dr. Balcombe writes in her report. A bloody rag and a stained pair of knickers were found in a plastic bag behind her body. The clothing fragments on her skeleton appear to be from a dress, maybe a nightgown. Some fibers found around her forearms and ankles are likely remnants of duct tape. She was wearing a cross necklace.

Cassie locks her tablet, gazes out at the empty fields flying by, remembers how Hayley Reid was found buried in the central reservation of this very road, wonders how many other girls have died like this, alone, afraid, thrown away like they were no better than dirt. How many more times can she do this? And yet, how can she possibly stop?

“Have you read this?” she asks Sunny.

“Mmm,” he nods in the affirmative, brows furrowed. “It’s bad.” As if she needs reminding.

“Sexual assault, I’m guessing,” she thinks aloud. “No definitive COD though.”

Sunny is silent for a long moment, fingers gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles go white. Cassie knows he is thinking about his girls, about the things people seem all too capable of doing to children. “The knickers. Did they pull any DNA?”

“No,” she shakes her head, “too degraded.”

“Fuck,” Sunny curses uncharacteristically, distress he is no longer trying to hide written all over his features. “I hope the bastard suffers.”

She hates that this is what the work has done to them. Looking into the abyss day after day, the bright horror of violence, so many wasted lives, so many terrible ways to go. She reaches out impotently, wants to comfort him but unsure how, and finally rests her hand on his knee, an oddly distant yet intimate gesture. He takes a hand off the wheel and grips her hand hard, eyes still fixed on the road.

They don’t speak for the rest of the drive, but something electric and awful swells in the stale car air around them. Cassie knows they are on the precipice, can feel her old demons crawling out of the shadows to join the hazy lust and anger and another emotion she can’t quite pinpoint. She turns on the radio again and a cheery Top 40 ingénue is warbling about boys and yearning and being young. Cassie wonders if the singer knows about what happens to young girls in the world.

* * *

The second time, they are both totally sloshed. It’s late, again. They are the last ones at the bar, the drinks going down as easily as sugar water. “Let’s not talk shop,” she’d insisted to Sunny earlier in the evening. The investigation had come to a disappointing standstill as potential suspects and witnesses offered up little and avenues of inquiry dried up. Nobody seemed to remember Rebecca, let alone care enough to help find her killer.

So they do not talk much at all, mostly just drink in each other’s quiet company. “The girls are at their mother’s,” Sunny says offhandedly, but it comes out sounding like an invitation. So this is how Cassie ends up against the inside of his front door, feet stumbling over a teenager’s trainers as he tries to kiss her and find the lights at the same time.

“Make me forget,” she whispers into the shell of his ear, and that’s really all it takes, her breathy voice, his addled judgement. He must have a bedroom somewhere, she thinks, but the cold stucco of his entryway seems more than good enough for now. He turns her around so she’s facing the wall. In the morning, she’ll find little plaster scratches on her palms and forearms. Rug burn on her calves from when she must have gone down on her knees. Skinning on the inside of her thighs from when he must have reciprocated with his head between her legs.

She wakes up head throbbing, a memory of frenzied, clumsy sex wrapped in a nightmare of scattered bones and rotting cadavers. Her body tangled with Sunny’s, and then the dead ones from her dream, still and stiff, caught in a scream. There are so many ways a body can be.

Cassie makes her way to his bathroom, tries to gargle out the taste of him and sticks her mouth under the tap for a long, cool drink of water. Christ, her reflection in the mirror looks awful. There’s the faintest mottling along her collarbone from Sheffield which was supposed to be the first and last time. And then there are the new markings: a completely conspicuous bite just under her jaw, a bruise on her shoulder, other ones she can feel but can’t quite see yet.

When she returns to the bedroom, Sunny is gone. “Cass,” he calls from the kitchen. No use in running this time. He is in a robe, brewing coffee and slathering butter on some toast. The domesticity of it unravels a knot in her stomach, something terribly humane and gentle in his actions.

“Did you have a bad dream?” he asks, too kind and too generous. “I was going to wake you up, but I wasn’t sure.”

“No,” she lies, and he can tell. “I should go.” How can she be so bad at this?

“Cassie, eat something. Please.” Sunny pours two mugs of coffee and hands her one. “Careful, it’s hot.” She burns the roof of her mouth a little anyway. If she stays, eats breakfast with him, acts like she belongs in his house, it will mean something, even if she isn’t sure precisely what. It will mean something, and part of her wonders if she actually wants it to. Wants to mean something to him, because he already means something to her.

* * *

The call comes in early the following Monday. Murray takes it. It’s Rebecca’s foster sister, the one who’d shared a bunk bed with her, frantic on the other end of the line. Murray gestures to Cassie in her office, scribbling in his notepad with the other hand.

“…All right Mrs. Davis, we’ll need you to come in to the station for an interview…How does three in the afternoon sound?” Cassie catches as she approaches his desk. “See you then. Thank you for calling.” His expression is somber as he hangs up.

“Louise Davis,” Murray flips through his notes. “Says that between the ages of eleven and fourteen, when she was fostered by the Wilsons, she was repeatedly raped by the father, Thomas Wilson.”

Cassie absorbs the information like a punch to the gut. She feels like she’s been here one too many times, and each time is just as horrible as that very first assault case she worked on as a DC, all those years ago. Maybe it’s better to become jaded, a little dead inside.

She briefs the team on this new, if not totally unexpected angle. It’s usually this way, isn’t it? No serial-killing Tim Finch or Strangers on a Train this time. Only a girl likely murdered by the man who was supposed to love and protect her.

Louise Davis is tense and fidgety when Sunny and Cassie interview her. Her eyes are red-rimmed, like she has been crying for a while. “I didn’t tell you when you first visited me because I try not to think about it. It feels like a whole other life.” She twists a strand of auburn hair around her finger. “I had an abortion the year I left that place, 1984 I think. You can look it up, can’t you? It was his.”

They find it in her medical records, a D&E when she was fourteen. Christ. It’s relentless. Sunny puts his face in his hands, presses his fingers into his eyelids. “If he did kill Rebecca, what is there left for us to do?” Thomas Wilson had died in 2012 of a heart attack, a year after his wife was involved in a fatal car accident.

She can feel the bleak crush creeping in now, that sort of hopeless anguish she’d felt staring at Natasha's unmarked, hillside grave. Maybe this is it. “Hold the fort, will you? I need to clock out early,” she says abruptly as she turns to return to her office. Sunny watches her, cogs whirring, worried. They’ve been here before, except this time, she’s more than a co-worker. This time, he’s scared she might not be able to claw her way out the other side.

* * *

The third time, it’s a mistake. He shouldn’t have gone to her house, imposed on her like that, but he was concerned, or at least that’s what he tells himself. She’s voracious, totally wanton in her desire for him. “Harder,” she gasps as she bites down on his earlobe, digging her heels into his back. He’s rough with her, shunting her up against the headboard, gripping her wrists so she’ll stop flailing.

Whatever this is, escapism, sex-as-therapy, just fucking, it can’t be good for either of them. But what else is there to do in the face of all that horror? Just animal instinct now, two bodies, not dead yet, and what living bodies do.

Afterwards, she lets him stay.

* * *

Sunny discovers the transaction in a tall stack of bank records he has been slowly making his way through. A payment from the owners of the warehouse where Rebecca was found to a subsidiary of the contracting firm Thomas Wilson worked for. Finally a concrete connection.

The last straw comes the next day, when a woman in a crisp suit turns up at the station, demanding to speak to Cassie. “Louise told me I should talk to you,” she says deliberately, measured. Her name is Isla Evans. She lived with the Wilsons between 1984 and 1989, from when she was thirteen until she moved out. She never crossed paths with Rebecca, so they had not prioritized tracking her down.

But now Cassie can see it coming from miles away. She tells them about the abuse, the shame, the terror, the anger. But then, “When I was around fifteen, after he raped me so badly I couldn’t walk right for days, I told him I was going to tell the school, tell the police what he’d done to me.”

She looks up from the table to Cassie and Sunny, her eyes molten with this horrible unburdening. “He said I wasn’t the first, that there’d been another girl who’d made the mistake of speaking and that he’d killed her. Slit her throat. I thought it was just a threat!” she wails, covering her mouth with a hand, a hellish howl as the truth of it becomes starkly clear.

They end the interview there, the last five minutes on the tape just the sound of Isla crying, sobbing, rocking back and forth in her chair.

* * *

There’s an inquest, but it’s a speedy, hushed thing. Cassie suspects there are forces above her none too keen on scrutinizing how a vulnerable eight-year-old girl ended up in the home of a child rapist and how no one went looking for her after she went missing.

It’s an old, old story, Cassie thinks as she watches Rebecca’s casket get lowered into the ground. Sunny and some of the team are there. So are Isla Evans and Louise Davis. They’d done a collection at the station, the thought of Rebecca ending up in a potter’s field somewhere too heartless to stomach.

It’s an old story of a man who thought he could hurt girls with impunity, of the underbelly of life they seem to overturn with every case, of secrets that lose their power in the light of day. She picks up a handful of soil and scatters it into the grave. She remembers that old nightmare, Hayley, Alison, Natasha, Victoria, dirt filling their eyes and ears and mouths, half-alive still, clawing and scrabbling. There’s been a new one recently, Rebecca in her plaits and school uniform, standing up to her abuser, and then a bright gush of blood, a long gash from ear to ear.

Sunny comes up behind her, wraps an arm around her shoulders even though there are still others around. “Cassie,” he murmurs into her hair, “it’s time to go.” She fights back tears, blinks fast and rubs her eyes. But instead of guiding her away from the grave, Sunny cups her jaw, tilts her face up and brushes a tear off her cheek with his thumb. The tenderness of the gesture thaws something in her. She buries her face into his chest and finally lets herself cry.

* * *

The fourth time is not really a fourth time because he takes her out to dinner instead and they don’t actually have sex. She would be fine with a ruby, but he makes her go into Soho, a really nice place, way too fucking expensive. This is a bad idea, she thinks on the way over, almost ready to bail. But then he texts her, “On my way!” and there’s even a colon-parenthesis smiley face, and she can’t bear the thought of giving up on them now.

After the case had ended, all the clerical loose ends tied up, all the paperwork filed, they had talked. Really talked. “Cassie, please give this, give us, a chance,” he’d pleaded, and she remembered how after the first time, that cripplingly awkward conversation in the car, she’d secretly wanted him to say this, wanted him to fight for them and what they could be.

So this is how she ends up in an actual restaurant and not a pub with Sunny on a Saturday night, surrounded by other couples in various stages of dating or matrimony. God, it sounds strange. Her and Sunny, a couple. And yet it also feels totally natural, all those years of police work and partnership behind them.

Cassie wonders if they’ll have much to say outside of the morbid and the melancholy, but she shouldn’t have worried. Sunny updates her on his parenting woes, affectionate even as he gripes at his daughters’ insistence on pushing his buttons and boundaries. She tells him about Adam and his New York girlfriend, and how much she misses him. By the time dessert rolls around, they’re both gently sloshed and she’s describing a holiday she’s thinking about taking to Saltcoats for her annual leave.

“We could go together,” she says easily, and it stops them both in their tracks for a moment. This very real thing they’re doing. The plans for the future they might dare to make. Or not, she almost says, but he’s a little faster than her.

“I think I’d like that,” Sunny replies, and she realizes that it’s not all dread and horror, being alive, that sometimes it’s light and happiness and anticipation. There's pain, and then there's a place beyond it, if you can get there.

They walk around aimlessly after dinner, Cassie tucked into his side, hand clasped in his. They find themselves on Waterloo Bridge, cars hurtling by, the city lit up around them and reflected back in the murky water. She stops Sunny halfway across the bridge and turns to face him. This time, when she kisses him, there’s no escapism, no wild battle for control, just her soft mouth, the faintest taste of grapes, the sweetest whisper of something that might be hope.


End file.
